Vatican Official Flogs “Secularized Charity”

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Archbishop Paul Josef Cordes is the president of the Pontifical Council “Cor Unum,” which coordinates the Catholic Church’s charitable institutions. ZENIT reports on a speech the prelate delivered at a Catholic university in Italy. Archbishop Cordes has previously emphasized the importance of Christian organizations maintaining or recovering their Christian identity, but in this address he drew on Pope Benedict XVI’s encyclical Deus Caritas Est to make his strongest statement yet:

“The large Church charity organizations have separated themselves from the Church and from their link with the bishops,” he said. “They have identified themselves completely with the nongovernmental organizations and have presented a program that is indistinguishable from the Red Cross or the United Nations.”

Doing this, he said, “they would be contradicting the 2,000-year history of our Church, and seriously deteriorating the credibility of its preaching.”

The archbishop evidently did not name the organizations he had in mind, but one infers from the report that his remarks had a “you-know-who-you-are” quality about them.